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The head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's civil liberties office said the transition to a more transparent intelligence community will be slow. "The intelligence community is not designed and built for transparency. We're designed and built for the opposite," said Alexander Joel, the ODNI's civil liberties protection officer. He spoke on a panel at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies Dec. 4.

In the aftermath following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, federal agencies and law enforcement drove home the need for increased information sharing and improved performance throughout the intelligence community. The information failures that plagued the system previous to the attacks demonstrated the consequences of division during a crisis. Had well-run fusion centers been available at the start of this century, the deadliest terrorist attack in history would have resulted in a different outcome.

The outcome of the year's flurry of gun control legislative activity was similarly mixed, as this timeline of some of the most headline-making bills - and the fallout from them - demonstrates.